Creating New Units of Culture

Our measurements are our agreed-upon codes for what matters, but once they are installed into our culture, it can be very hard to know when it’s time to rethink how we measure things in the first place. Our beliefs and feelings have a tendency to move forward before we have the models to describe them and the artifacts of culture – language, norms,... See more

cultural tastes may be shifting towards a new demand for authentic, hand-made digital experiences

The social sector acts on culture-level concerns in the domain of governance. One example is the sudden mid-20th-century dominance of "historic preservation" of buildings, pushed by organizations like the National Trust for Historic Preservation in America and English Heritage and the National Trust in Britain. Through them, culture declared that i... See more

Rather than prestige, this cultural moment is dominated by metrics, as George S. Trow predicted in a 1980 New Yorker essay called “Within the context of no context”:

“That movement... from wonder that a country should be so big, to the wonder that a building could be so big, to the last, small wonder, that a marketplace could be so big—that was the

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the internet’s sprawling databases, real-time social-media networks, and globe-spanning e-commerce platforms have made almost everything immediately searchable, knowable, or purchasable—curbing the social value of sharing new things. Cultural arbitrage now happens so frequently and rapidly as to be nearly undetectable, usually with no extraordinary... See more

Here is where culture enters the picture. I mean“culture” in its anthropological rather than artisticsense. What values and practices can hold people to-gether as the institutions in which they live fragment? My generation suffered from a want of imagination inanswering this question, in advancing the virtues ofsmall-scale community. Co

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